Essay On Posthumanism, Aldous Huxley And Brave New World

Essay on Posthumanism, Aldous Huxley and Brave New World

What is Posthumanism?

The literary movement to which the book Brave New World of the writer Aldous Huxley can be ordered is called “Posthumanism”. As described by Jeff Wallace in his essay Literature and Posthumanism, this movement of the humanities, contemporary art and literature refers to the evolution of the transformation of the human being to something else with the intervention of the new technologies such as genetics, neurology, cybernetics, informatics, robotics, among others.

Strictly speaking, this movement exists since there is technology that changes the human being physically or mentally, when it adds something that was not there originally, for example when we use eyeglasses. However, when we manage to preserve the mind and put it in a different body, or to genetically change the body or the biology of the human, we speak of the truliest posthumanism, a tendency has experimented its greatest significance only since two decades ago, hand in hand with the technological advances in areas where the human being changes to be something different, something that goes beyond the physical and mental boundaries of the human being.

One of the earliest works of literature that address this topic is Brave New World, from Aldous Huxley, who goes ahead of its time by bringing us a look into a realistic posthumanistic future already in 1932.

Literary Style

The literary style of Aldous Huxley has been described as “simple, direct, and vivid” (book-review-circle.com). In other words, his stories flow as if the author himself were telling us the story.

In particular in the book Brave New World a very precise narrative can be noted, since the author knows deeply every aspect that he incorporates in his book. The effects of the “soma” substance are based on the experiences of the author with different drugs, namely the psychedelic drugs (Open Culture). He started with mescaline, in 1953, and LSD in 1955, and recorded his experiences with those substances very precisely in his book The Doors of Perception.

These experiences evidently helped him to shape “soma”, a futuristic perfect drug, which has intensified positive effects of drugs, like relaxing, long “high” periods, among others, without any of the downsides, such as slumbers or corporal addiction.

Another aspect of his writing style is the precise description of technology and politics. For example, in a realistic manner, he successfully creates a world, whose politic is based in an alternate development of the First World War, the Russian Revolution , and, especially, of the Ford Model T, which plays a primary role in the society model that Huxley describes. This historical knowledge can be also seen in the names of the characters, which in a veiled manner make an allusion to important communist and capitalist figures of the XX century, which in Huxley’s book came to exist in a complete different, yet credible reality.

Additionally, he transmits a powerful message in his writings. In the case of Brave New World, where he shows us a realistic, yet not very optimistic view of the future, he shows us that happiness cannot be just an induced sensation with lack of problems, but rather that problems and suffering are necessary for happiness to exist. Happiness cannot be described as an individual and separated sensation than can be induced, that would be a temporary pleasure at most; the truly happiness is intrinsically linked to the difficult situations of life and without them it is an empty sensation, not happiness; the latter is also composed of overcame difficult moments or problems.

Another message that he transmits is when he compares the perfect society of the Brave New World and the one of the “reservations”, which resembles our “unperfect” world; with the character of the “Savage”, which is used to living in a harder, yet more meaningful world, he emphasizes the message that a world without suffering is not exactly a perfect world.

Finally, in Brave New World, the book that interests us, at age 38, he deals with topic of posthumanism, by showing us, according to his knowledge and imagination, how in a future technology would have radically changed the lives of humans, transforming them and their society, everything that is human, into something completely different, by going beyond the limits of the human body and mind.

Opinion of Huxley on: Human being

Huxley sees humans as beings with principles, which is clearly exemplified in the character of John “The Savage”. The moral of this character is the human moral, compared to the posthuman moral of the other characters. He knows suffering, and for him a perfect world which does not include natural human feelings, such as sadness is false. For him it is correct to feel sadness, not only happiness and delight, something that can be seen when he mourns as his mother dies, something that the doctors at the hospital, with a posthuman moral, do not feel

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